


that girl is a (goddamn) problem

by orphan_account



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, But when is Krennic not creepy, Creepy Krennic, F/M, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, What-If
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-07
Updated: 2017-01-16
Packaged: 2018-09-15 14:49:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9239624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Jyn has been huddled in the dark for hours when she hears an unfamiliar voice bark an order, "Open it." the strange voice snaps, and Jyn feels dread pool in the pit of her stomach. The voice was terrifyingly close to her hidey hole.Mam had called it a hidey hole when they'd had it first built, and had told Jyn to think of it as part of a game of hide-and-go-seek. But the game wasn't a game when Jyn was alone in the  pit, and she kept on seeing her mother's body crumbling to the floor, her father holding her corpse. Jyn bit down on the inside of her cheek, and looked up as light flooded into the pit.The face that peers down at Jyn is her father's - for a moment her body goes lax with relief before she sees the expression of despair twist upon his face at the sight of her, and she realises why as she sees a second face appear - the cold man, from before, who had spoken to her father as if they were old friends but shot her mother before her eyes."Why, hello there." The cold man's voice cuts through the air, and a tear slips down Jyn's father's cheek.An alternate universe where Krennic got his hostage - but Jyn didn't become any less of a rebel.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well. I just went to see Rogue One tonight for a bit of Star Wars fun. 
> 
> Ha. Ha. Ha. 
> 
> That was a mistake, because I cried for approximately half an hour after it was over, came home, browsed tumblr for any hope that what happened did not in fact happen, and then decided to write this, because I'm a glutton for punishment. Please commiserate with me. 
> 
> When Lyra died, I saw that shit coming from a mile off. When Galen died I gave my mum's hand a squeeze of horror. When K died I whimpered like a small infant. When Bodhi died I let out a squark of outrage, amidst tears of shock, because goddamn, this isn't a GRRM novel. When motherfucking Chirrut and Baze died, I was in pieces. And when Jyn and Cassion died part of my weak heart was destroyed. Plus, Leia at the end was a nice punch in the feels to complete the cocktail of despair.

Jyn has been huddled in the dark for hours when she hears an unfamiliar voice bark an order, "Open it." the strange voice snaps, and Jyn feels dread pool in the pit of her stomach. The voice was too close, far too close, terrifyingly close to her hidey hole.

Mam had called it a hidey hole when they'd had it first built, and had told Jyn to think of it as part of a game of hide-and-go-seek; _we'll snuggle down deep inside and no one will ever find us_. But the game wasn't a game when Jyn was alone in the empty pit, and she kept on seeing her mother's body crumbling to the floor, her father holding her corpse. Jyn bit down on the inside of her cheek, and looked up as light flooded into the pit.

The face that peers down at Jyn is her father's - for a moment her body goes lax with relief before she sees the expression of despair twist upon his face at the sight of her, and she realises why as she sees a second face appear - the cold man, from before, who had spoken to her father as if they were old friends but shot her mother before her eyes.

"Why, hello there." The cold man's voice cuts through the air, and a tear slips down Jyn's father's cheek. Jyn doesn't understand how they found her. This was the hidey hole, no one should have been able to find her. Had she ruined it all? Had they followed her footsteps, could she have done this? Mother had promised. _No one will ever find us_. But Mother was dead, and there was no 'us' anymore.

"Krennic, please-"

"Come up here, child." The cold man - Krennic - puts on a voice that is sickeningly sacchrine, like Jyn is an idiot. When she doesn't move, his expression becomes harder. "Come up here, and nobody gets hurt."

Father closes his eyes so he doesn't see her climbing up the ladder rungs.

.

The rooms on the big ship are huge, and have too much empty space. Jyn is placed in the same room as her father - they had tried to put her separately, but Father had dragged Krennic ( _Director Orson Krennic of the Supreme Empire_ ) into a side room whilst the stormtroopers shifted their guns and stood in silence, all of them staring at her. She'd bitten her cheek so hard this time that she'd drawn blood. They were only away for a few minutes, but it felt like a lifetime, and the voices that Jyn could hear through the door were low and mean.

But at least Jyn is with her father - it takes them half a day to be flown into space, wide and vast and void, to another ship, bigger than the mountains on the horizon of Jyn's farm. And then it is weeks and weeks of being shuttled from one ship to the next, each bigger and scarier and emptier than the last, if that made any sense - Jyn feels scared that the emptiness of the universe is going to come and swallow Father whole.

He seems to become smaller as the days press on, as if he is being worn away to become another man completely, one she doesn't recognise - _stardust_ , he whispers to her at night, and that's the only way she can comfort herself that her father is still with her, even as the Empire cuts away his hair and his beard, discards of his old clothes and fits him with streamlined suits, even as his eyes grow tired with every day that passes - Jyn even checks herself, sometimes. She wonders if she is shrinking too. She feels a lot smaller than she used to. There is so much nothingness in space, so much emptiness where Jyn's mother used to be. She should be the one stroking Jyn's hair when she has a bad dream, be smelling of smoke and herbs and plaiting Jyn's hair loose enough for it to come out at the end of the day. She should be kissing Father's forehead and reading by the fire and complaining about her sore joints.

But Jyn's mother is gone. And maybe a chunk of Jyn's father went with her.

.

There are no children on the Empire's ships. There are stormtroopers, who Jyn learns are as identical underneath the masks as they are wearing them. There are the commanders, the directors, rarely there are some admirals. There is father, but he is barely there sometimes, like a ghost of the man that Jyn remembers. He kisses her, and holds her, and tells her that one day she'll understand that everything he does, he does for her.

Jyn doesn't think she'll ever understand why he hasn't already killed Krennic, like Krennic killed Mother. She flies at the Director once when they're having one of those stupid Sunday dinners, screaming and crying, and Father pulls her away, and Krennic laughs. _Keep her under control, Galen,_ he says like he's concerned, like he cares, _or she'll be kept under control. She's too much like her mother for her own good._ That night, father weeps and weeps, and finally tells her that bad things will happen if she isn't a good girl. Can you be a good girl? Jyn wants to say no, is about to, but something that looks like it might break wavers in her father's exprssion. She nods sullenly, and casts her eyes down. She'll be good, she'll try. Just for now.

Jyn spends her days flanked by droids who stare at her as if she is something that is not in their programming. Eventually, she begins to grow out of her old smocks and tunics that she and father had fought so hard for her to be able to keep - every stitch made by mother's hands. She cries when one day she comes back to an empty wardrobe and Empire seamstresses, who give her stiff shirts and tight trousers and push a small, pathetic undergarment toward her that they say that she'll need now she's getting bigger.

She almost throws up when they're proved right.

.

The day Jyn wakes up, a year or so after that injustice, curled around her father, blood staining the Empire's white sheets, she screams and screams and screams. _Shh, stardust,_ Father pulls her into a tight embrace as she screams she's dying, she's dying, they've killed her, Krennic has killed her like he killed her mother, _I had hoped your mother would have been around to explain this to you._

Everything changes, after Jyn bleeds for the first time. She doesn't know why she is suprised. Her entire life has changed so many times already, beyond recognition.

Suddenly, there are no compromises anymore - she is assigned a sleeping quarter of her own, on the other side of the ship to Father. He weeps as she is taken away, but he doesn't resist. She resists. She punches at the stormtroopers who turn their heads away as she kicks and fights and she's dragged into another empty room. "You bastards," she screeches at their retreating backs, "you bastards! You bastards, you bastards, you bas... you bast..."

She loses her tight shirts and restrictive trousers that she had just become used to - now she has long swooping garments that make her into some kind of sexless ghost, thick and weak and vulnerable all at once. She can't run in the robe, can't climb, can't fight - which is probably the point. The other point is to make her obvious - not a stormtrooper, not a commander, not an engineer or a pilot - a _woman_ , with little to offer other than her value as a hostage.

Another change, is that she has a timetable now. A schedule. She is no longer free to peruse around the ship of that month - her father and Krennic move around constantly, as if they are running from something - to climb inside the walls and pick up rude words from hovering outside meeting rooms. Krennic tells her this in his irritating way, saying she has _responsibilities_ now. This is when you'll piss and that is when you'll eat and here is when you'll practice your organ and then is when you'll suck up to whoever I need to woo. Krennic says he just knows that she'll make both him and her father proud. Hah. Krennic has the strangest notion that he has had some kind of hand in her raising.

Oh, he has taught her some things, she'll give him that - she can lie now, can pretend, can even fake trust. She's been lulling him into a false sense of security for years. She was a child when she flew at him, without subtlety or patience. But she's learned from the best, and Jyn Ersa is not a child now. But she still remembers her mother's broken body. She still remembers her final words. _You will not win,_ she repeats in her head as Krennic touches her like she's his daughter too, telling her how proud he is of how she's excelled at her courses in languages, art and diplomacy. "Thank you, Director," she intones, smiling prettily, when inside her head goes the mantra _you'llneverwinyou'llneverwinyou'llneverwin_. He'll never trust her, he'd be a fool to, and Krennic is no fool - it would be easier if he were. But he's not on guard all the time. And maybe one day... one day... he'll let down his guard at the right moment, in the right time. One moment is all it takes. One day, she'll finish what her mother started,

Those responsibilities that he spoke of, it turns out, are to be sold like cattle to the highest bidder. Old men, empire men, or their sons, their monstrous offspring. Her father goes grey when Krennic announces the plan at one of his infernal 'family' dinners - and the cranberry sauce that Jyn has poised above her steak looks an awful lot like blood. She lets it drip, drip, drip onto her meat as she processes this latest development. "You honour me, Director," Jyn's mouth is dry but she ducks her head down to hide her expression, feigning shyness. Her hand tightens around her fork, and she forces herself to become lax. Pliant. Non-threatening. Her window of opportunity has just become very slim indeed.

.

Jyn's next few moons are spent on the planet of Naboo, the Emperor's home planet and the centre of the Empire - each day she is paraded out like a piece of meat to be inspected by various high ranking Empire generals and their sharp eyed apprentices, sons and senators. How many languages do you speak? Do you dance? Can you write poetry? Will she birth sons? She doesn't look all that fertile to me. Will she be an obedient wife? Will she be any trouble?

_Oh, I'll be trouble all right._

Most of them don't come back - the terrible ones, at least. Jyn slowly begins to realise this is just another one of Krennic's games to keep her father desperate and afraid for her - whoever she marries is Krennic's choice, for all that he talks about how its for her father's reputation, to get himself a planet base of his own as her dowry from the Empire. But it's all him. It's _always_ Krennic. Once the vows are said, she's theirs - some of them, she admits to herself, are better options than others. The ones who have murder in their eyes and ask about whether she has any spirit are ones that she'll marry if her father misbehaves. She'll be dead within a year with any of them, one way or another. Or worse. Others - soft spoken scholars with powerful fathers, who look afraid even at the sight of her, with her unfamiliar woman's body (or the little that can be made out through her robes) and unwavering stare - those are the best options. A weak man, she can survive. She has survived Krennic after all these years, after all.

She sees two men every day, and they seem in almost endless supply - Jyn loathes them all equally. She has a morning and an evening performance, as she thinks of it - in the morning she greets her customer in the palace gardens, strolls with them until the sun is high in the sky as Krennic and their father or master argues with Krennic over her price. They leave, she breaks her bread, and then the next young fool arrives, for yet another trek through the gardens with the same negotiations going on behind her. By the end of a month of this, Jyn knows the gardens of Naboo like the back of her hand.

So she knows where to run to when the Rebel bloody Alliance suddenly appears in the skies of Naboo, hitching up her impossible bloody robe to her knees and fucking sprinting away. In the confusion and the screaming, Jyn realises she is running towards the explosions instead of away from them, like everyone else. She weaves in and out of the hedgerows, her hair coming out of these damned tight plaits they've put her hair in for _years_ , and she feels like whooping when she glances behind her and there's nobody following.

She is free, finally free, she marvels internally, exulting.

Then the entire world is full of fire, and Jyn's mind catches up with her body and realises she just ran head first into a warzone. Shit.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Palpatine leaves his backyard undefended, all for the purposes of plot.

K-2SO has a job to do, and that job is to keep Cassian Andor from getting himself killed. It's harder than it sounds.

"Cassian, there is a 94% chance of painful, bloody death if you follow the Major's orders and go in through the front of the palace-"

"Kaytoo, please," Cassian gripes as they hover over the Senate, invisibility shields up but about to run out any moment, considering they were stolen from an imperial warship and all but completely incompatible with their out of date hovercraft, "we have our orders. Our job is to get in and cause a distraction. Going through the front will cause enough panic to allow the others-"

"There's a 52% chance that the security out front will finish you off quick enough to catch the others, and that's just if you manage to somehow get through all the shields, the possibility of which is astronomically low- Cassian, if you do this then all probabilities point towards complete and utter-"

"-failure." Cassian finishes K-2SO's sentence in a mockingly droll tone, rolling his eyes. "Everything is well defended Kaytoo, for gods sake, it's fucking Naboo, Palpatine isn't going to leave his own backyard undefended-"

K-2SO's internal statistical calculator whirs and spins at those particular words. "Well," he says slowly, "he kind of did."

Cassian's eye twitches, and he looks at the countdown to the invisibility shield falling - 2 minutes 29 seconds, 2 minutes 28 seconds...

"What?" the pilot demands. K-2S0 feels intense satisfaction that Cassian is having one of his rare moments of accepting K-2SO's impeccable calculations. It really shouldn't be as rare an occurence as it is - he's a statistics droid, this is what he was built for.

"All of the palace is shielded," K-2SO explains, "but the building is so well protected that nothing short of the entire rebel fleet could break it. But the gardens have less defences, and less security, leaving them to be the best point of entry as it would draw stormtroopers out of the palace, leave a hole for the other rebel ships, and be a short distance from the Senate. Going through the backgarden rises the chances of success by 42%-" K-2SO just about manages to stop himself from crowing in victory as Cassian's eyes widen in understanding, and he begins to change their route to smoothly sit almost atop of the gardens.

Small figures walk across the greenery, looking like tiny ants, and Cassian scans the forcefield. It's even thinner than K-2SO had guessed it would be - Cassian would be able to break it with a few well aimed blasts.

Palpatine clearly didn't have a statistical warfare droid as well programmed as K-2SO was, else he'd have fixed it. That, or he was just as stubborn as Cassian Andor, and never listened to his statistical warfare droid when it told him these things.

If androids could feel - and K-2SO was fairly certain that when people felt, they felt the same things as he in his steel body felt - K-2SO had a sense of overwhelming smugness.

"Well I'll be damned," Cassian says mostly to himself, "the bastard _actually_ left his backyard undefended." He picks up the comm as the time before they're visible ticks down - 1 minute 9 seconds, 1 minute 8 seconds...

"New plan," he says into the comm, "we're going in the back."

.

Cassian breaks the forcefield with four well aimed, compact blows from the main blaster. For a moment, it wavers, and Cassian doesn't even think before pushing the acceleration forward with all his strength. The people below begin to scatter, and he doesn't realise he was holding his breath until he lets it go.

Kaytoo looks alarmed as he picks up his blaster. "Cassian, our orders were to create a distraction, there is a chance of 84% that the General needs no additional help from you in order to acquire the documents-"

"That may be so, old friend, but when have I ever left things to chance?" Cassian says, shooting Kaytoo a grin over his shoulder, feeling that familiar rush of hysterical fear that washes over him like a drug at Kaytoo's predictions of his almost certain demise. It was addictive, surviving, against all the odds. And Cassian didn't like that gap of 16% failure. He'd given everything he was, everything he'd ever been, to the Rebellion, and this was the riskiest, most outright show of defiance that they had ever dared as of yet. They needed every soldier they could get.

Kaytoo makes a noise that almost sounds like a tut. "You have left things to chance on multiple occasions, Cassian! Are you forgetting that disaster aboard the destroyer-"

Cassian waves him away, although looking back, the incident in question had been a bit hairy. Not that he'd ever give Kaytoo the satisfaction of knowing he agreed with him. "You coming with, or not?"

"Absolutely not!" Kaytoo declared, squinting at the gardens outside that were already becoming a battlefield, "I will wait here, as your getaway pilot. I'm a very good getaway pilot."

Cassian rolled his eyes, and flicked the safety off his gun. "Try not to get yourself reprogrammed, Kaytoo." The doors of the ship opened, and Cassian ran towards the Storm Trooper regiments that were already marching towards the Rebel ships.

"Try not to get yourself killed!" Kaytoo's voice whipped out behind him before the real fighting began.

.

Jyn could not tell you how she ended up with a blaster. She doesn't remember disarming anyone, or being brave, but she saw it, and grabbed it, somehow before anyone else noticed her.

She stood on a precipice, oddly removed from the carnage for a moment as she watched the rebels - people of all species and ages and creeds fighting tooth and claw in their higgledypiggledy fleet with their makeshift weapons - clash against the uniform, unyielding Imperial army.

She had to choose a side, and quickly, before someone noticed her and decided she was a threat no matter who she was - she was clearly no Stormtrooper, but in her Empire fashioned dress, she wasn't clearly a rebel either. At least if she picked a side, she had other people to rely on for her protection until she figured out how to get off this bloody planet.

Jyn's childhood memories of blank masks hiding blank faces rushed back. She chose her side st the same moment she caught a stormtrooper in the back - she had been aiming for his leg, but decided that dead did the job as well. At least she hadn't missed.

It happened astonishingly quickly, and her hand is shaking like a leaf, but she's pulled back into the rebel ranks, and shoots another Imperial guard. And another. Just as she begins to get into the swing of it, her aim improving with every hit - not all of them kills, but all of them enough to take another enemy out of the game, the rebels pull back, like an unforgiving tide. She shouts in confusion, tries to go against the current of people who as one being fly away from the fight all at once, and then sees what they had - a star destroyer. Coming straight for the palace gardens.

Jyn runs with them, after that. Her mouth tastes like blood, and there's something warm trickling down her face, and eyes burn with ash and dust. It isn't even a decision - she lunges for a rebel craft that has a closing door, and makes the jump, even if her gown doesn't. A loud rip sounds as Jyn scrambles away from the exit, and she automatically curls into the foetal position as she feels the familiar shudder of hyperspace begin. Her ears pop.

She allows herself to uncurl when everything goes suddenly, beautifully silent. The chatter, the screams, the sound of the blaster bolts - all of it replaced with the whir of an engine. "Thank fuck," she says to herself, as she rights herself. Her relief doesn't last long.

"Who the hell are you?"

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song Problem by Natalia Kills (who actually made half decent music before she proved herself to be a heartless famewhore. Good song. Bad singer.) As always, please tell me what you think, both good and bad - getting reviews is the highlight of my day.


End file.
